great legislative achievements

House Votes to Fight Chinese Spying on Americans With American Spying on Americans

The House of Representatives gave a thundering seal of approval on Thursday to a delightful American version of a News of the World-style private information-stealing initiative except that because it is the American version, it must be bigger and more hairy and makes it particularly not illegal for armies of nosy trolls to collect and search warrant-free through private Internet communications as long as the troll is seated at a computer located in a federal agency office building. The bill, CISPA, is being sold by its bipartisan sponsors with the usual doses of constipated hollering about Chinese spying, which it proposes to solve in part by authorizing mass U.S. spying, on its own citizens.

The government cannot ask private corporations such as Google or Facebook to turn over private user communications; the bill merely “empowers” companies to turn over information they think constitutes a cybersecurity threat along with any information they would kindly like to volunteer “to protect the national security of the United States.” The companies do not have to protect identifying information if they don’t feel like it, so it will be up to your email provider to decide whether Department of Homeland Security agents get the privilege of laughing at you for your unicorn porn addiction support group.

Under CISPA, any company can “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property” of the company. This phrase is being interpreted to mean monitoring your communications—including the contents of email or private messages on Facebook.

Right now, well-established laws, like the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, prevent companies from routinely monitoring your private communications. Communications service providers may only engage in reasonable monitoring that balances the providers’ needs to protect their rights and property with their subscribers’ right to privacy in their communications. And these laws expressly allow lawsuits against companies that go too far. CISPA destroys these protections by declaring that any provision in CISPA is effective “notwithstanding any other law” and by creating a broad immunity for companies against both civil and criminal liability.

An amendment prohibiting the government from using information it obtains to monitor the legal activities of protesters did not get a floor vote, so all of you malcontents will be stuck forwarding Uncle Norm’s chain emails with the pictures of the dogs drinking beer to avoid suspicion from now on. [The Verge]

And it has to get through the Senate before it gets to Obama. So who knows what is going to happen. If Obama is really serious about the veto threat, the Senate may not even bother to take it up. Of course, the special interests that wrote it will just try again at some point. This bill is already an attempt to rewrite the SOPA bill from a few months ago.

At least KBJ is writing relatively calmly about this. If Ken Layne had written this post the bill would already be as good as passed and Obama would have torn up the Constitution and turned America into 1984, etc. etc. hysterical screeching and so forth.

Wile E. Quixote

And from what I've seen when Obama says 'vowed to veto' he really means 'will bend over and grab his ankles and sign it in the vain hopes that David Brooks or Kathleen Parker will write a nice column about how bipartisan he is.'

Guppy

The same Obama that voted to give AT&T a free pass for doing pretty much the same thing?

US America corprats are the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human beings (thanks to the Supremes over 100+ years ago) I've ever known in my life and would never ever ever ever abuse the system ever.

Hey, that was important information to have. Particularly the visual evidence.

SayItWithWookies

Great. I'm going to FOIA the emails of all the Republicans in Congress — that ought to put a stop to this bullshit.

sullivanst

Listening to the EFF outrage machine, you'd think the bill didn't contain any kind of definition of what constitutes "cyber threat information", or that the definition was so vague that it would cover forwarding emails of cute kitten pics to your Aunt Mary.

The bill actually makes clear that cyber threat information is information about hack attempts. Emails and private messages on Facebook are not hack attempts, and could not in good faith be mistaken for hack attempts. That kind of snooping just isn't covered by CISPA even as it currently stands, and the immunity clause would exclude it also.

That's not to say it's an ideal piece of legislation, but it's quite clear I'm not cut out for a job at EFF because I just don't have what it takes to maintain a professional level of outrage 40 hours a week.

Is there really such a thing as unicorn porn?
(Afraid of the answer.)
(And no, I won't goggle it.)

sewollef

All this is really redundant anyhoo…. since the NSA [aka. National Sarcasm Agency], will shortly have the capability to listen in on every phone call — in real time.

So that's every phone call made in the United States by everyone, 24/7 — in real time.

William Binney was a senior crypto-mathematician for the NSA. He was responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network. Now retired, he was interviewed recently by Vanity Fair… his most scary comment: He held his forefinger and thumb close together and said, "We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state."

In 2001, the NSA was capable of recording 320 million phone calls a day. A day. That was 2001. Today, they are nearing completion on a new listening centre in Bluffdale, Utah, that can read, store and search any communication that travels through US infrastructure. As of 2008, that meant 1.5 billion calls a day could be recorded.

That translates to something like 20 Terabytes of information a minute. Mr Binney above, developed a data-mining capability that can read every word — in whatever language you choose.

Once this new facility in Utah comes on stream they will be able to decrypt 256-bit AES encryption. Considered strong enough for the NSA to use themselves.

The scary thing [!] is when the NSA manages to break these 256-bit AES algorithms, they will have access to everything ever recorded by the United States secret agencies — going back 50 years. They have it all.

Best of it, it's all in the Vanity Fair article. They don't care who knows anymore.

mormos

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH CONGRESS?

ttommyunger

Don't need a job, don't give a fuck about public opinion, too old to be scared by a life sentence, don't do, say or think anything I wouldn't want the world to know about, so fuck the snoopers, fuck all of 'em very much.